Building Durable Real Estate Portfolios at Morgan Stanley – Lauren Hochfelder (EP.514)
Episode publishedPodcast: Capital Allocators – Inside th...Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
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We focus heavily on sizing our funds to the opportunity set. What you've seen over the last ten, twenty years is the rise of the mega cap fund. Scale is no doubt a superpower. It's hard to even express how valuable that is. However, when you've seen the rise of these individual closed end funds that are $20 plus billion to be deployed over a four year period, you can be the world's most extraordinary investor. But if you have that much scale, you are going to be forced to deploy. We position ourselves on both the real estate and infrastructure side for closed end funds as squarely mid market.
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Lauren Hochfelder, head of global real assets at Morgan Stanley, where she oversees a team of 300 investment professionals across 13 countries managing 80,000,000,000 across real estate, infrastructure, equity, and credit. Lauren joined Morgan Stanley as an investment banking analyst directly out of Yale twenty six years ago and has spent her entire career at the firm, helping build one of the industry's leading platforms. Our conversation traces Lauren's journey from analyst to global head and the evolution of Morgan
Thank you. It's so great to be together.
I'd love you to take me back to your path to this building.
It was a short path because I joined right out of college. I joined as an analyst straight out of Yale. No finance experience at all. I had been an investment banking summer analyst at Bear Stearns, but with that small exception. I joined straight out of college and have been here since.
Take me through what that path is to be working at the same firm for a couple decades.
It's certainly one of the great surprises of my life that I am here still twenty six years later. It's been extraordinary. When I joined as an investment banking analyst, two year gig, at that point, I'm not sure I knew if I was gonna go back to business school or back for a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy. It was pretty broad. What's been extraordinary is that I get to come here every day and still learn. I don't need to change firms to have multiple careers. I feel like I've been surrounded by incredible colleagues, partners, and consistently been given opportunities to do more and more and
Walk me through the path of those major milestones over those twenty six years.
I joined as an investment banking analyst. At that time, our real estate investing business was housed within investment banking. I had this fantastic opportunity to work on all things investment banking, M and A, equity raises, strategic transactions, also investing in real estate on behalf of our funds. I was quickly drawn to that. As an associate, I became dedicated to the investing side of our business. I've, with one small exception, spent my whole career in a linear fashion. I was the associate underwriting and executing the deals. And then over time, I came to be promoted to head of acq
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